Our game's development has come to an end!

In 3 months our little rafting game, where the physics were buggy and the water was a blue plane, has grown into a real product we can be proud of! We managed to get our vision out into the world, and now its out on the greater river of the internet! That isn't to say that there wasn't a fair amount of panicking during the development:

Many of our skills, technical and artistically were put to the test. We attempted to leverage everything Unreal Engine had to offer, made use of creative technologies like gradient textures, UV channels and physics-simulated animation, learned a ton about water and how boats work, to work together and most importantly that making a game with a group of talented people that support each other can be an educational but very fun journey!

We've grown from a bunch of enthusiastic but anxious students into very proud (but still anxious) game developers. Despite that this is a college project, we are happy with the end result. What we were able to do in 3 months time together was not only fun but useful in our future in this industry.

But enough talking about  the panicking (of which there was a fair amount), let's see where we are right now; the paddling!

When players enter the game, they'll find themselves in the training area! Here players can join the game, get familiar with the movement, test out the pick-ups and swim. A real maiden voyage for first time players. After getting familiar, player 1 can start the game up and start paddling!

On the river, we have many challenges: the river current pulling you down, the obstacles you can bump into that throw you around on the river and of course the other players! Make sure to watch that energy, because paddling doesn't come for free. So, grab your friends and try to get through the unforgiving river rapids!

That about sums it up, but what did we do in the last, crucial moments of polish?

This week, all of the work our artists did went towards our launch: trailer, presentation, our itch.io page; some assets or features were scrapped, and will only be added if we decide to continue working on this lovingly cared for projects after our launch. Our programmers have been sanding away bugs and playtesting to make sure everything runs smoothly. They also added a camera shake when bomb explodes and a rumble of a controller when an obstacle hits your raft! 

The last 3 months have been a crazy ride, and our game's launch feels surreal. We hope you enjoy playing this as much (or more!) as we did working on it. We're definitely gonna miss it. You can view our trailer from our front page of course, but we're also linking it here :)

And as always...

Happy paddling,

the team